madrid, spain, picky was born in plymouth england in 1962 but since graduate from oxford university almost continuously since banctec his latest book is a biography of late dictator francisco support by adolf hitler and mussolini. he rose to power by defeating a loyalist in the spanish civil war the last of the 1936-1939. even control the spanish government until his death in 1975. 1975. he was a strong supporter of national catholicism and a strong opponent of democracy. >> a new interview with author about his book a biography of francisco franco. booknotes+ with her host brian lamb is available where we could to podcasts and on the c-span now app. >> u.s. supreme court justice sonia sotomayor spoke of

university of alabama school of law in tuscaloosa. she called the courts repeat recently to emergency docket under president trump unprecedented and gave her thoughts on ai and judging come relationships on the high court amid polarization of the number of other topics. here's a look. >> so now it's my honor to introduce our guest speaker. and i want you to know i said this, i'm aware that every moment you hear my voice is a moment are not hearing hers. that said, i have a problem. it's very difficult to sum up the life andnd career of associe justice sonia sotomayor. hand iu would expect a supreme court justice to do. sumo commodity princeton graduate yale law school graduate yale law journal. nominated by president george

h.w. bush at the age of 37 perhaps the most important district court in the united states the southern district of new york. nominated by president del quinn and serving with distinction for over a decade and finally in 2009 nominated by president barack obama. justice sotomayor's story is not typical at all. her childhood years were spent in the housing area in the bronx and her parents both of whom came from puerto rico spoke spanish. when she finished at yale she

didn't do a clerkship or take a job in a fancy law firm instead she worked 80 hours a week prosecute an ordinary criminals. even when she took a job with a firm in new york her practice was unconventional and her book recounts the story of chasing down pirates in new york city. that was the baseball, all right. that was the fashion part, i'm sorry. and her work reflects these experiences. she has been concerned with the way law plays out in the lives of ordinary people.

she has assured as one can be for these ordinary people are treated with fairness and her system operates with integrity. i'm looking forward to our conversation today for justice sotomayor has a lot to teach us not only about law but also about resilience, and leadership and success. not only that, her inspiring story isn't an exemplar of the richness and beauty as well as the challenges and the best aspirations of the american providence forging one people out of such plurality and diversity. not based on ethnic or cultural uniformity but instead on the shared commitment to liberty and equal justice under the law. justice sotomayor it is a great honor to have you with us to be

our speaker for 2026. can we welcome her again? [applause] >> you know i have had fear and one was covid where it appeared remotely instead what i'm so glad that you persisted. it's a beautiful loss goal. for any of you haven't seen it before, come and visit. strikingly beautiful. i was told the kennedy center in washington that this building is so but i've been more impressed with your faculty and your students. they are such engage people. thank you for the privilege of coming to meet them and i want to thank the albritton family. i can't thank you enough for

your fifth or sixth generation of support if this law school. and please convey to your father and mother my deep sorrow that they weren't here but how glad i am at that they sent u.s. representatives. thank you. thank you. as you well know the format of this afternoon's lectures question answering the questions have been submitted previously. i will be reading them in recognizing where possible. >> i have sat through thousands of lectures and halfway between somebody is falling asleep. i prefer this format because i get to answer what you are interested in. >> will thank you let me say having watched her do this format this morning -- let's get started. this is a question for my

colleague for the federal courts began experimenting with artificial intelligence and case management but scholars have proposed more assisting judges in their chamber work including for examples of use of ai for so-called generative meaning. where do you see the line between ai tools that are helpful in those at risk displacing judicial judgment? >> that assumes it's not helpful to have judges substituted. [laughter] look, ai is a sophisticated human. it is all of its input is input from human beings and because it is that it has the potential to

perpetuate the very best in us and the very in us. because what goes into computers if it's bad data, what comes out of our bad results, okay? so it can be a very dangerous tool, particularly in the complexity of human endeavors or human situations. what ai can't do is ask the question and that is inherent when a danger in any system that you're asking to give answers to. i am told by a colleague that there is a computer system that predicts an ai, that predicts our supreme court decisions and it's touting a higher prediction rate. i told him i thought that was a very bad thing because it shows

we are way too predictable and we may not be stepping out of our normal thinking and opening our minds to new ideas. it's something like an ai system that can predict with that high of a level of success what the outcome will be. but it will perpetuate the worst in us and that i think is its greatest danger is a tool. we have to employ it with judgment and understanding their something to be said about human intuition and something to be said about the human curiosity that lets us see the big picture and figure out what is missing. that is something that ai -- ai is unable to do and whether we

deployed weathers and the judges chambers or in law schools and for every student in this room do not graduate this institution without learning how to master ai as a tool. i was just at dinner with a bunch of former law clerks all of whom are very successful partners at a variety of well-known law firms and all of them were telling me that all of their associates are expected to use ai. you can't leave here without mastering it as a tool. but do not believe that it substitutes for our thinking. what it does is put together the way people have thought up to now and get shoe alternatives but you still have to make the choice. and people are hiring you to think better than the computer, to think more broadly than it

and to be asking the questions that will lead you to discovery. for me a tool we will have to use and it's a tool that will substitute many jobs not just in law. i had a conversation with my brother maybe a year and a half ago about how he thought ai would influence the medical profession is that you can't substitute for a doctor trade the other day when i got back a lab result is that red by ai i'm not show sure my brother is right. i don't think any of you in any profession should not be afraid. it is going to be a massive shift in our economy and in everyone's work. it's going to substitute broad swatches of industries and positions. so we all have to approach it

with some care and wariness. it's not a panacea but it is an important tool that's going to make and is the new revolution. just as computers where the revolution of my generation of lawyering they were just starting when i was in law school and i was in law school in the 1970s. we are now in the 2020s and ai is the tool you will have to master. >> our second question is from a student. >> hello. we had lunch together. >> or question his how do you decide to write separately and dissent and what does the role of dissent play overtime? >> i had a colleague teacher. i was an adjunct or faster when

i was on the court of appeals in new york trade i taught it to universities in new york. my coat teacher used to tell law students there were three questions they had the answer for anything they did. the first question and it's the one i ask myself for my dissent is what is my purpose? what do i want to accomplish by writing this? to do that i often have to figure out what is my audience. who was it that i want to be thinking about when i'm writing the question is why? it's not merely talking to that audience but is there something that i want to do with what is happening in the third question is, is there a better way of accomplishing what i want quick

sometimes i have been in a court conference and said i'm not going to dissent but i do want to put forth the other argument to all of you because i think there's some strength to it and we should discuss it, okay? i have made a calculated choice in my mind that a written dissent was not serving a useful purpose so i don't bother with it. i will exceed the majority vote not giving up my beliefs. i'm just saying the other side has sufficiently persuasive arguments that it's not worth a dissent. when i am elected to write a dissent it's because there's an audience i want to impact and to think and perhaps to change an outcome that the majority has reached that i think is wrong.

i argued dissented and i think the other guy has got it wrong, okay? that audience can very depending on the situation that i'm addressing. many dissents are for judges in the courts. they are the supreme court upholding the judicial practice for an interpretation of a rule that governs how judges approach a case and in those cases i understand the courts below a lot of discretion so i'm writing to highlight for them other considerations they might bear in mind when they are entering a decision in a similar case in the future. issues that i think the judge who rules in our case we have not paid enough attention to. so what is my purpose there? to bring forth a different way of thinking of something that

other people will think about. and i'm starting and attempting to not influence but to get people to think about the issue more broadly. trusting that the effect over time will be when people have considered something that i've said it might influence them and others might come up with better counter arguments to me, all right? because it doesn't mean i'm necessarily right but it does mean that i'm by something. then there are the decisions were, talking to others from congress and there has been this sense that have led to changes in law and the court is saying this is how we read a situation and this is what we think congress intended and i point

out why that intent may not be the one that congress have for the outcome may not view what congress intended. the most famous of those situations is the lily bed better case of the equal pay act where justice ginsburg wrote a very powerful dissent where she pointed out it was so unfair to limit the recovery of the woman who wasn't paid equally to her male counterpart because her employer was hiding that information from her. the court ruled there was only a limited statute of limitations for rich she could recover for that unequal pay. and justice ginsburg pointed out many things about why. what happened when the next president came into office he change the law. and so there's no a longer

statute of liberty -- statute of limitations. sometimes the audience might be a state higher court who is interpreting state law and you can point out why that interpretation might suffer some difficulties and it's a way to have, like i might be doing for a lower court judge in the federal system to say maybe the next case you have to think about this, okay? sometimes it's for people and this is the way the court is interpreting the law and we are the last word on the constitution, okay? that laws not only congress can change but people can change.

sometimes my intent is to inform the public about the consequences of the line law and get the public engage in the conversation. and so there is no one argument that the hope is always to engage people considering more broadly to questions that are being decided. the one thing that's i chafe at his how many people don't read supreme court decisions. they read newspaper headlines and decide from the headlines which side they think is right. but it's such a wrong way to get involved. you really have to read the decisions understand how difficult cases before the supreme court are. supreme court justices are highly trained lawyers.

all of those very successful at our craft. when we are given an opinion to right we are writing the best opinion just about anybody can to make the best argument for the decision we are supporting. it doesn't mean that the issues are that simple. you often have to read the dissent to understand what the majority has washed over. what wrong step they might have taken, what detour in the law they are creating. there are always things you need to understand before you accept the court's decision and you have to accept it because you have to follow the law but i mean to accept the thinking, you have to think and you have to be an informed citizen that needs our decision and considers the

argument and considers what role if any you should be playing in changing whatever we say. but you have a role and so for me it should be a conversation between the justices and the public. >> our next question is from luke collins. luke asks again legal interpretation. >> okay, luke. >> ronald argues that legal interpretation is never really mutual in any method of free stuff and that's more commitment whether it's mixed with that or not. do you think he was right and if so what does that mean for how we should evaluate its?

johnson would tell you it wasn't true. he's a man who grew up here in alabama at the time and segregation is deeply embedded and in the principals of the constitution he went against all of the cultural expectations of the time. all of the expectations of probably many members of his family and friends. many of those southern judges were ostracized because of their legal positions in many cases. and despite all of that they still voted to uphold the constitution and segregate the schools in the south. so we aspire as judges to rise

above our prejudices. it's not easy though. sometimes you don't even know you have them. often you don't. i have been at hearings where judges have asked questions where i have known that they just didn't know something, okay? like one argument, one of my colleagues asked the defense attorney in front of him who besides the drug dealer carries two phones? i'm sitting there and i'm going to government lawyer who is sitting there. [laughter] if you're company or a government lawyer you have to carry two phones because you can't abuse your company phone, okay? my point is that justice is not

biased or intentionally. it is that we are creatures of what we are talking creatures of what experiences we have and those can blind us sometimes to the prejudices we hold because we are unaware. but that doesn't mean we can't rise above it. that we can't on many occasions put aside those personal beliefs as if those judges in the 50s, the 60s and the 70s, and understand that their values and principals greater than the ones that we intuitively believe. and so i don't know that i agree fully. i do agree however that we have to work at it. and that we have to be conscious

of that and rendering our decisions. we have to be aware that we are all shackled by our moral compass and its strength and its limitations. because it is developed by societal norms that some are wonderful and some may not be so wonderful so our choices can very much be influenced by that. plessy versus ferguson was one of those choices. but then nine extraordinary justices, all men all white issued brown versus board of education. they rose above their upbringing >> thank you. our next question is from j.

arnold. how has your time as a trial judge impacted how you evaluate credibility on appeal especially in closer cases where they might support either side? >> who asked that question? that was you, hi. i was at lunch one day when i was on the court of appeals down in new york and judges were discussing that question. i was a district court judge and i had a colleague there at the time would have been a district court judge on the court of appeals. but all the district court judges were saying that you know credibility is a human endeavor and it does make a difference in how people testify in their manner of testifying and it can

and does influence juries all the time. my court of appeals colleague said there's no such thing. it's given too much credence that the judge credibility -- we judge people's credibility by whether their story makes sense. you look at all of the evidence and you try to put the puzzle together and to their holes you cannot disbelieve a person and if the story holds together and you believe them. but you rarely if ever make a determination and neither does the jury merely on credibility on judgment about credibility. i look at the person and i believe them. most of us don't operate in life even that way. when your parents walked into the kitchen and say, and ask who

took the cookies from the cookie jar and all three kids are standing there shaking their heads. the one with crumbs on their lapel is probably the answer. the point is that i'm not sure that there is an answer to that question. what i am sure of having done trial work is that when you are able to judge people, see them, listen to their stories, it makes you more comfortable at the decision you come to it helps reinforce conclusions that are very hard. one of the most difficult lessons i learned as a judge, a

district court judge when i handled trials is i would ask juries, could you be fair and impartial? i never had somebody raised their hands say i can't. people don't want to emit they can't be clear. this is hard to do. so you have to ask them questions that could suggest why they might be biased one way or another and how you pose the question is how you could determine whether contrary to their stated beliefs they might not be impartial in this particular case, okay? but my point is that i for one do believe being a trial judge has helped me as an appellate judge immensely because when you

understand that your decisions affect people i still see that people want to read the transcripts. i don't know how many of my colleagues do that. but to me that's a part of me and often i know just in the recent case my law clerk had copied sections of the jury nixed the law clerk bring me the full transcript because i knew by watching how the questions had developed in with the answers were out of frame the arguments i thought were more compelling. but my point is i think being a trial just isn't valuable to a an appellate judgment.

i would make every appellate judge have trial experience but it's okay. the ones who don't are all right. >> thank you. our next question asks in recent years the court has used its emergency docket for rulings. as a guide when the court makes decisions in the marriage process and how should our it's a jewish and respond? seems straight out of the news. [laughter] >> for those who don't know enough about the courts, what is the emergency docket quick to understand what it is you have to know what the norms are in the norm is the case tims to a trial court, district court and that's the first level of court.

that judge hears the case. he hears not just the legal arguments that develops the facts. people go to court with different stories and somebody has to determine what the actionable story is, and by actionable i mean which is the story that's going to need legal protection, okay? the judge has establish those facts and heard the law and given his or her opinion. there is going to be a and that not going to like it. they have an opportunity to appeal to a higher court. in that process generally the procedure is that the judge who got to hear and decide the facts, which are not generally revealed and they are some exceptions but generally not. so the facts have now been

decided, okay? and sometimes by a jury. what is going to be really as our -- reviewed or any judgment of law but it can't be enforced until a higher court overturns it. the losing party can sometimes post a bond to stay the judgment pending appeal or sometimes a losing party can go to the intermediate court and say to that court, this is something that there was a grave error made and i will be irreparably harmed if the judgment is in force. please hold off and please stay it pending your consideration of the case. the court of appeals granted or denies it. if the stay is denied at losing

party has a chance to go to the supreme court and make the same argument. this judgment will cost me a irreparable harm. this judgment if you let it go into effect can't undo the harm to me and the decision is egregiously wrong so you shouldn't let it come about. up until more recent times the supreme court intervened by granting stays or overturning stays where you really. why? because i don't know if the word is a protocol but it would be in approach to things that say we are up here.

we should be letting the lower courts decide these issues first before the highest court of land make the final decision. we should make sure that all the facts are fully aired but the intermediate courts have looked at those and we really shouldn't take cases and decide them until there's a certain split meaning that circuit courts across the country have disagreed on the answer because then we are sure that every viable and important argument has actually been aired, that all the important facts have actually been brought out in the various cases. and since we are the final word we should do it with some deliberation to make sure we get it right.

so that counsel, the supreme court, from most of its history until more recent times not to interfere with what's happening with the courts below. there's a lot of writing about what the rules are etc. there's disagreement among us right now about the efficacy of the emergency dr. and in what people have done with the shadowed doctrine. but that background the basis for the disagreement, okay? what has happened? there has been a slight shift in understanding the concept of irreparable harm. it has led to an immersion of

many emergency applications to the court there are members of my court to believe and for my reason for not calling them right or wrong order them but when congress passes a law it causes congress and the people irreparable harm to have that law ignored. and the president does a policy that the courts are staying that will harm the executive irreparably by staying one of those actions until we decide. so that shift in paradigm, where previously we sort of looked at the individual harm versus the

harm, if you start with the presumption that there is irreparable harm to one side then you we'll have more grants of emergency relief because the other side is going to have a much harder time if they are capable at all and if they have an individual harm. so it has changed the paradigm on the court. i think the newspapers are filled with reports about how many emergency motions we are receiving. it's unprecedented in the court's history. we have done it to ourselves but the point is i have written that

so i'm not saying something out of school, okay? it is a question it's one that we should continue. >> thank you for the next question asks many americans have trouble by deepening clinical divisions in our country. at the justice how do you build bridges across ideological lines with their colleagues. >> if you mean bridges, convince them that they are wrong? [laughter] i dissent on that so much and i'm not very successful. no, no, no. my colleagues and i we are students of the law.

we are there because we have shown a deep passion for engagement with the law and the legal theory and legal approach. we think deeply about the issues that come before us and on some questions it's very hard more so on constitutional questions, to talk people out of an approach that they think is the right approach, okay? that's why the pundits are able often to predict our outcomes. ai doesn't have a hard job in every case. and it's not that we are stuck in our ways but because we approach the legal issues in a way that we think is sound for each of us. now, in every legal approach

there is a positive and a minus. i'm aware of my minuses and i'm aware of my positives, okay? i hope they are too. but it's going to be hard to bridge that gap statutory questions we do it often. we have really talked the rollout of statutory questions because there we are thinking about what congress might have intended and some of my colleagues say their number one indicator are the words that congress used but words can never be in isolation and you have to look at them in the context and see how they relate to the other words of the statute. there could be more grounds for debate on that, okay? but how do we talk? how do we get to a point where i think most of us actually like

each other and we can certainly left together. we have lunch together often after an argument and after conferences. you will see me walking the halls with people with whom i never agree on the court and we are joking and talking to each other like two human beings do. for me, it's because i'm not thinking that how they vote to find them as human beings. i'm looking for the very dust in them as human beings. and i'm finding the areas in which we share commonality. every one of them is devoted to their family and children. their spouses, their children, their parents and the people,

their friends. they are all incredibly loving and giving to those people. every one of my colleagues has an organization that they have worked with and that they are devoted to helping. they have institutions that they've been affiliated with better charitable works that they support. they are people who care. now i could say they care about different things than i did, not really. they may hear about different issues than i do a bit more, but in terms of the human values, we share the same ones. ..

and with many of them, i think i dare say that i have a friendship. >> our next question is from sean, sean asked, the law center, private sector work with the civic obligations you've described in your previous opinions? >> i'm so glad that you asked that question. at lunchtime i think i told you if it wasn't your table i told another table that i know so many lawyers in private practice who are rich. i love them and i'm so proud of them. they make money doing something

they love doing, okay. i love what i'm doing but i'm not rich. [laughter] >> but i'm very comfortable. i don't complain. my point is that every one of them who i admire are people who find that balance, who take the wealth of their law firms and insist that all of their associates and themselves devote time to public interest work. every one of them gives not just legal time but money to causes they think are important to help the community. despite that, he's given to this university. it might be because it's a family institution, but the point is that what he's doing is for you and every penny he gives

is to open students eyes or ears. i don't believe that public interest lawyer should count their job as their public interest service. i think they should be involved in activities outside of work and that's what really counts because it's not there when somebody says you to do good. count that as being all that valuable. so even when i was a prosecutor i was involved in organizations outside my work and i get the permission of my boss but i did. and even in private practice, i did the same. even today as a justice, i'm here, right, but i go and do speaking to kids of all ages. i've been to head start programs, they have no idea who i am. [laughter] >> i went to one one day.

they taught them to perform a play for me and they must have talked about me, right. i went into their play room and sat down and i'm putting together something with one of the kids and he's reaching behind him to go pick something up and there's a picture and he looks at for picture and looks at me, he said that's you. [laughter] >> you know, but if i say or do something that stays with them, it makes a difference. i support in terms of speaking to their students a high school mentoring program in washington, d.c. that mentors kids and then onto college. i did while i was a judge below and continue that kind of work as much as i can, my point is

that as busy as you might be in your private life, it is -- should be part of your moral compass that you give back to community. my colleague justice scalia once said that the greatness of the legal profession is that we are citizen lawyers first. when you think of our founding fathers, more than half were lawyers. that's not accidental, okay. but it's a testament to what the profession draws which is caring about the community. that's what we are doing helping people in the relationships with one another and we have to care and give time to it. >> thank you, our next question is from my colleague toby smith who directs our criminal

defense. [laughter] >> the court's application to fourth amendment seeking to preserve degree of privacy against government that existed during the time of ratification, contrast in some respects with your interpretation of other constitutional provisions. do you see that contrast as inconsistency with fourth amendment dock written servation a model for how other guaranties should apply or is the only lesson of the fourth amendment uses words whose original meaning is more adaptable to novel applications? [laughter] >> are you a student or a lawyer already?

>> i'm pausing because the premise of your question is correct that in this area we've been asked more to think outside of original times because circumstances have changed so much, okay. so i tell kids, all right, the fourth amendment says no unreasonable search and seizures, okay. and at the founding it had to do with going into someone's home and searching their home and their private papers, okay. that principle gets challenged with technology, so what happens when a plane goes overhead and measures the amount of heat being generated from your home

to find the level of heat commensurate with marijuana growing underneath the roof. can the police do that? what happens when you're in your home and no one -- and we would say that was a trespass and that was unreasonable and illegal, but then the courts had to deal with what happens when you put your ear to the wall and listen to the conversation inside. what happens when some spy, network is sitting in the car or a building a mile away and

directing radar into your -- or something, whatever they do, into your space wavelengths and picks up your conversation? and is we moved in the fourth amendment early from the concept of trespass, of moving into someone's private space and putting a bug in it or doing something like that, okay, to expectation of privacy that's being invaded and so is this space that i'm in, is this activity that i'm doing something that i have a reasonable expectation will not be interfered with by others. that's not quite how we felt with other constitutional

rights. i'm explaining your question so i can explain my answer in part, okay. that's not quite how we approached it but there been different theories on the eighth amendment, unusual -- cruel and unusual punishment. in interpreting that, we have also looked to new standards too unlike we've done in other constitutional protections. in the eighth amendment, even my originalist colleague and one of its fathers justice scalia once said, by burning them alive and that today he probably would find that cruel and unusual. he said that before he died. and he suggested in one speech near the end that he wasn't sure

anymore but -- [laughter] >> but i'm going to hold him to his initial gut, okay. my point there is, no, it's not unique to the fourth amendment and in many ways there are -- even my most arden originalists are calling about what it is. even with gun control, my colleagues have adhered towards the obligation that we have to find lawful, only those gun control measures that were permissible at the founding, but if you read the writing of my colleagues, some of them have said who are originalists so they're now disavowing the theory, what they're looking at like the fourth amendment is not

an exact historical duplicate but principles that guided what the founders did and to apply those principles today. so in answer to your question, i don't think it's completely unique, but i also -- and i think it has a lot to inform other areas of law. since i am much more a justice who believes in the power precedent as informing decision-making which originalists tend not to, i do believe that we get informed by the principles over time. i'm just a person that sees how the society and courts have applied those principles and take more lessons from that than some of my colleagues do. >> we've got time for one more question and -- what advice do

you have for younger women who many in the school want to be leaders in their community and profession? >> i talked to anyone who wants to be a leader and what i tell them is, find a passion. the only way you lead people is if you yourself have a passion about your cause. you have to believe in it. you to believe in the righteousness and you have to be willing to show how hard your work to make that passion a reality. people follow leaders who believe and leaders who care about what they're doing and the why of it. women have to find the voice to do that. we as women, you know, you see

the men playing sports, how vicious they can be sometimes, but that's their passion and their game. and unfortunately boys are taught that more because of sports and a lot of the sports are very physical like football and stuff and you can really throw your whole body into that, and so it becomes a little easier for women -- for many women the shyness is hard to overcome, but the way to do it is to not be thinking about you but thinking about the issue that's moving you and letting that issue speak for you and looking to it as a guiding light that will give you meaning in